Op-Ed Columnist: The Ed Koch Show

"I never doubted that I would be a good mayor," said Ed Koch, with a self-satisfied smile. "I never did."

It was Tuesday night, and the documentary "Koch," written and directed by my old friend Neil Barsky, was having its premiere at the Museum of Modern Art. In his late 80s, the former New York mayor looked his age in the film, but he was still very sharp and quite funny — and as needy as he'd always been for public attention and approval. As Ed Koch matter-of-factly uttered those words, early in the movie, the audience, full of former staff aides, political loyalists and New York movers-and-shakers, chuckled knowingly. Throughout his political life, Koch's ego had never been far from the surface. It says here that his egotism is part of what made him a great mayor.

Koch had planned to be in the audience Tuesday night. He had cooperated fully with Barsky and had given a few interviews in the run-up to the premiere. He was clearly looking forward to basking in the spotlight again. But earlier that day he had been admitted to the hospital. By Friday, he was dead. Is it tasteless to say he couldn't have planned a better promotional campaign? Probably. But Koch himself would have laughed at the joke. Which was another thing about him: He was probably the last mayor of New York to have a sense of humor.

Like Koch, Barsky was born in the Bronx. A former Wall Street Journal reporter and hedge fund manager, he was in college when Koch was first elected mayor. About 10 years ago, he told me, he had driven around the South Bronx, an area he hadn't ventured into in decades. He was stunned to see, as he put it, that "I couldn't find any of the old burned-out buildings" that he recalled from the 1970s. "They had all been replaced with real housing."

Affordable housing was a big part of Koch's legacy, Barsky realized; indeed, under Koch, the city spent $5 billion on housing, more than the next 50 American cities combined. The memory of that tour of the South Bronx stuck with him. When Barsky closed his hedge fund to become a filmmaker, Koch was an obvious subject.

Which is not to say the film is a big wet kiss. Yes, it gives plenty of credit where it is due: Koch's sound financial management brought the city back from the brink of bankruptcy. He helped New York regain its confidence. He took on the transit union. He began the process that led to the renewal of Times Square and other areas of the city. He reduced the rampant crime that had created such a climate of fear in New York.

But Barsky is also cleareyed about his foibles. Koch's lack of empathy. His contentious and at times ugly relationship with the black community. His slowness to react to the AIDS crisis. Barsky tackles the rumors that Koch was a closeted gay man, asking him point-blank about his sexuality. "None of your business," replied Koch, in somewhat more pungent language. (Many gay activists are convinced that Koch didn't do more during the AIDS crisis because he was uncomfortable with his own sexuality. But the totality of Koch's record — he was a leader in pushing for gay rights — suggests otherwise, at least to me.)

What was most striking about "Koch," however, was the extent to which, for Hizzoner, it was always about, well, Ed Koch. He needlessly picks fights, calling people "schmucks" and "idiots" when they disagreed with him. He takes actions designed to win him praise in the media. One of his former aides recalls him saying, after reading the paper, that nothing of note had happened that day. What he meant was that he wasn't mentioned. "How'm I doin'?" wasn't just a trademark phrase; it was an expression of a deep psychological need. On the other hand, if that is what drove him to spend $5 billion on new housing, who can complain?

A few days after the "Koch" premiere, I went to see "Fiorello!," a 1959 musical about another great New York mayor, Fiorello H. LaGuardia, which is having a short run at City Center. LaGuardia was also an egotist, who loved "the people" more than he did people, who reformed city government yet who also had a profound need to be at the center of every orbit he entered.

Indeed, the same can largely be said of our current mayor, Michael Bloomberg, whose view of himself as a Great Man doing a Great Job is so ingrained that, according to The New York Times, he has tried to recruit someone he thinks has sufficient stature to succeed him.

New York's three greatest mayors were also three of its great egotists. It's no accident.

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Editorial: More Lessons About Charter Schools

The charter school movement gained a foothold in American education two decades ago partly by asserting that independently run, publicly financed schools would outperform traditional public schools if they were exempted from onerous regulations. The charter advocates also promised that unlike traditional schools, which were allowed to fail without consequence, charter schools would be rigorously reviewed and shut down when they failed to perform.

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With thousands of charter schools now operating in 40 states, and more coming online every day, neither of these promises has been kept. Despite a growing number of studies showing that charter schools are generally no better — and often are worse — than their traditional counterparts, the state and local agencies and organizations that grant the charters have been increasingly hesitant to shut down schools, even those that continue to perform abysmally for years on end.

If the movement is to maintain its credibility, the charter authorizers must shut down failed schools quickly and limit new charters to the most credible applicants, including operators who have a demonstrated record of success.

That is the clear message of continuing analysis from the Center for Research on Education Outcomes at Stanford University, which tracks student performance in 25 states. In 2009, its large-scale study showed that only 17 percent of charter schools provided a better education than traditional schools, and 37 percent actually offered children a worse education.

A study released this week by the center suggests that the standards used by the charter authorizers to judge school performance are terribly weak.

It debunked the common notion that it takes a long time to tell whether a new school can improve student learning. In fact, the study notes, it is pretty clear after just three years which schools are going to be high performers and which of them will be mediocre. By that time, the charter authorizers should be putting troubled schools on notice that they might soon be closed. As the study notes: "For the majority of schools, poor first year performance will give way to poor second year performance. Once this has happened, the future is predictable and extremely bleak. For the students enrolled in these schools, this is a tragedy that must not be dismissed."

The same principles should apply to decisions to allow charter school operators to expand into charter management organizations, which manage several schools under a single organizational umbrella. Permission to expand should be granted only if the schools can demonstrate that they can actually improve student performance.

The study found that minority students and those from poor families fared better in charter management organizations. For example, the Kipp super-network and the Uncommon Schools, two large, established networks, have seen "strong and positive learning gains" for their students.

The study does not explain why these schools perform so well. But the answer is likely that they closely replicate a successful learning program and they keep the level of teaching uniformly high. In any case, the researchers and policy makers need to pay closer attention to how these schools function. For according to the study, Kipp and the Uncommon Schools have actually managed to eliminate the learning gap between poor and higher-income students.

Currently, only 6 percent of all schools are charter schools, and charter networks account for only about one-fifth of that total. States that are in a hurry to expand charter schools should proceed carefully. The evidence of success is not all that ample.

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Editorial: A Good Compromise on Contraception

The Obama administration has proposed a sensible way to provide women who work for religiously affiliated institutions with free coverage of contraceptives while exempting the organizations they work for from financial or administrative obligations to provide the coverage.

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For the past year, the administration has been battered by lawsuits and denunciations from religious conservatives that its health care reforms violate religious liberties by requiring employers to provide free birth control coverage even if the employers have moral objections. Those attacks were designed to try to discredit the health care reform law and hurt President Obama politically by portraying him, falsely, as an opponent of religious freedom.

All along, churches and other houses of worship have been exempted from the law's requirements. The issue has been whether organizations that have an affiliation with religious institutions, like universities and hospitals that employ thousands of people of different faiths and views on contraception, should be granted an exemption from providing free contraceptive services as well.

Neither the Constitution nor Supreme Court precedents give religiously affiliated institutions the right to be exempted from a neutral law of general applicability. The First Amendment is not authorization for religious entities or individuals claiming a sincere religious objection to the law to impose their religious beliefs on society.

Nevertheless, responding to those attacks, the administration a year ago proposed a reasonable compromise between religious objections and the right of women to affordable birth control. It put the burden on insurance companies to provide free contraceptive coverage to women who work for religiously affiliated employers without requiring any involvement by the employers.

On Friday, the administration issued a more detailed proposal that is now open for public comment. It does not seem to depart in any significant way from the earlier policy, and some advocates for women's reproductive rights, like the American Civil Liberties Union and Naral Pro-Choice America, praised the proposal. It modifies the definition of a "religious employer" and certain affiliated organizations to follow a section of the Internal Revenue Code more closely. And for the first time, it provides guidance for the large religiously affiliated institutions that self-insure, or pay their own medical costs rather than buy insurance coverage. These institutions can simply notify the companies that administer their plans that they will not cover contraceptives, and those companies would then look for a health insurer to offer separate individual contraceptive coverage at no cost to the women.

It will take some close accounting to figure out how best to handle the payment process for the coverage in the short run. In the long run, contraceptive coverage should save money by improving women's health and reducing the number of unwanted pregnancies, abortions and medical complications from pregnancy.

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Op-Ed Columnist: Rosa Parks, Revisited

Most of what you think you know about Rosa Parks may well be wrong.

On the verge of the 100th anniversary of her birth this Monday comes a fascinating new book, "The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks," by Jeanne Theoharis, a Brooklyn College professor. It argues that the romanticized, children's-book story of a meek seamstress with aching feet who just happened into history in a moment of uncalculated resistance is pure mythology.

As Theoharis points out, "Rosa's family sought to teach her a controlled anger, a survival strategy that balanced compliance with militancy."

Parks was mostly raised by her grandparents. Her grandfather, a follower of Marcus Garvey, often sat vigil on the porch with a rifle in case the Klan came. She sometimes sat with him because, as the book says she put it, "I wanted to see him kill a Ku Kluxer."

When she was a child, a young white man taunted her. In turn, she threatened him with a brick. Her grandmother reprimanded her as "too high-strung," warning that Rosa would be lynched before the age of 20. Rosa responded, "I would be lynched rather than be run over by them."

One of the most troubling and possibly most controversial scenes in the book occurs when Rosa is a young woman working as a domestic. A white man whom she calls "Mr. Charlie" tries to sexually assault her. Determined to protect herself, she taunts him as she evades him, haranguing him about the "white man's inhuman treatment of the Negro."

"How I hated all white people, especially him," she continued. "I said I would never stoop so low as to have anything to do with him."

Parks added that "if he wanted to kill me and rape a dead body, he was welcome but he would have to kill me first."

The author points out that although the story is recorded in Parks's own handwriting, it isn't clear whether it's completely true, half true or just allegory.

Rosa married Raymond Parks, a civil rights activist who sometimes carried a gun and who impressed her because, she said, "he refused to be intimidated by white people."

She spent nearly two decades before the bus incident struggling, organizing and agitating for civil rights, mostly as the secretary of the Montgomery, Ala., branch of the N.A.A.C.P. But it wasn't until Parks was in her 40s and attended an integrated workshop that she found "for the first time in my adult life that this could be a unified society." This didn't mean that she was eager for integration, though. She was later quoted as saying that what people sought "was not a matter of close physical contact with whites, but equal opportunity."

And Parks was by no means the first person to perform an act of civil disobedience on a bus. She was very much aware of many of the people whose similar actions had preceded her own, even raising money for some of their defense funds. She also encouraged others to commit these acts of civil disobedience.

Parks explained that "I had felt for a long time, that if I was ever told to get up so a white person could sit, that I would refuse to do so."

That day came on Dec. 1, 1955, when a bus driver asked her to get up so that a white man could sit. She refused. This was not a spur-of-the-moment decision. It was a political calculation informed by a life of activism. As Parks put it, "an opportunity was being given to me to do what I had asked of others."

And the idea that she stayed seated because of physical fatigue is pure fiction.

"I didn't tell anyone my feet were hurting," the book quotes her as saying. "It was just popular, I suppose because they wanted to give some excuse other than the fact that I didn't want to be pushed around."

The book also lays out Parks's leading role in the bus boycotts and her decades of activism after the civil rights movement.

When Parks died in 2005, Theoharis says, "The Rosa Parks who surfaced in the deluge of public commentary was, in nearly every account, characterized as 'quiet.' 'Humble,' 'dignified,' and 'soft-spoken,' she was 'not angry' and 'never raised her voice.' "

Parks, like many other Americans who over the years have angrily agitated for change in this country, had been sanitized and sugarcoated for easy consumption.

As Theoharis writes: "Held up as a national heroine but stripped of her lifelong history of activism and anger at American injustice, the Parks who emerged was a self-sacrificing mother figure for a nation who would use her death for a ritual of national redemption."

Fortunately, this book seeks to restore Parks's wholeness, even at the risk of stirring unease.

The Rosa Parks in this book is as much Malcolm X as she is Martin Luther King Jr.

Happy Black History Month.

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Op-Ed Contributor: Ed Koch, a Man of Certitude and Joy

I WAS a late arrival to the Ed Koch fan club. I grew up in a liberal, Jewish, Bella Abzug-loving household, and my parents spoke of him with a level of contempt they usually reserved for Republicans. Centrist Democrats are a dime a dozen these days, but back in the 1970s the prospect of a union-bashing, death penalty-backing Democrat winning City Hall was driving Manhattan Jewish liberals crazy. I was expected to hate him.

I was also gay, and by the early 1980s, every gay friend I had, every gay newspaper I read, every gay activist I admired grouped Mayor Koch in the same circle of evil as Ronald Reagan. It infuriated them that a man they took for granted as homosexual — the dearth of proof notwithstanding — was shutting out Larry Kramer and other activists as our friends were dying of AIDS. Even when his eyes eventually opened and money for AIDS prevention and treatment started flowing from City Hall, the mayor was growing increasingly close to Cardinal John O'Connor, considered another charter member of the evil elite by AIDS and gay activists. Cardinal O'Connor was using his pulpit and media megaphone to condemn homosexuality, condom distribution and AIDS education at the time. Mayor Koch disagreed with him, but they were so tight that they would go on to write a book together. My gay friends expected me to hate the mayor as well.

In truth I had secretly grown to like him. I loved his iconoclastic politics, his unabashed pride in his Jewishness, his outspoken style in a profession dominated by the cautious and the mediocre. I was as enamored as anyone by his politics of joy.

To speak with Ed Koch was to be in awe of his certitude. I once got into a conversation with him about a barrage of criticism he'd been leveling at one of the city's most influential rabbis. "You're Jewish!" I said. "Don't you feel a little intimidated to attack a rabbi?" He thought for a second. "Mayor trumps rabbi," he said.

Moral certitude in a politician can be a turnoff if you don't share his politics (or his morality). To be a New Yorker in the 1970s and '80s was to marvel at the blizzard of insensitivities, personal insults and bullying attacks that emanated from City Hall every day. But New Yorkers tend to judge their mayors by how well they can keep the city under control. And for much if not most of his mayoralty, he performed the job exceptionally well. Like Rudolph Giuliani several years later, Mayor Koch's belief in his own righteousness was his weakness as well as his strength.

To know Ed Koch personally was to experience a merry-go-round of approval and disapproval that could leave you perpetually off balance (which may have been the idea). For all the paternal encouragement he'd give you, he could also turn on you on a dime.

Once, sitting on the set of "Inside City Hall" with me to discuss the war in Kosovo (you could invite Mayor Koch on to talk about anything), I thought I had him trapped in a contradiction. He evaded and I pursued, over and over until the smile faded into a scowl. "I can explain this to you," he said. "I cannot comprehend it for you." I was rendered speechless but completely impressed.

Despite his insulting me on live television, the doubts that I'd picked up at an early age about him had faded by then — he was several years removed from his last days as mayor — and I think that went for a lot of other New Yorkers as well. His incessant boast that he was "a liberal with sanity" didn't seem as irritating as it once had. Most of his views didn't seem particularly conservative any more, even to liberal ears.

History will judge him on the totality of his career. His failure to recognize the severity of the AIDS crisis was of a piece with that of most other American politicians of his era. If he was in fact gay and closeted, he failed to make a show of extraordinary courage that could have saved lives. So did hundreds of gay people in positions of power at the time.

As he grew older, his hard edges softened and he became a more forgiving man. When Bella Abzug died in 1998, his instinctive hostility gave way to a wistfulness that the lions of his time were beginning to fade away. He knew that the day was approaching that he'd be one of them.

In my last, increasingly warm conversations with him in his final years, he conceded a mistake here and there. And he confessed in a book that he regretted never falling in love.

But to the end, Ed Koch wasn't big on admitting he was wrong.

One day while I was sitting at my desk at New York 1, he arrived for his weekly gig on the station's "Wiseguys" segment. From across the newsroom, he yelled something horrifying to me in a voice so loud it turned heads.

"You're gaining weight!" he shouted.

Claire Brinberg, my producer, evidently called him soon afterward to tell him how I'd taken his hurtful observation — which wasn't well — because the following week, he walked up to me and said, "I'm sorry."

He looked as if he'd swallowed castor oil. "O.K.?" he asked.

"O.K.," I said, and he walked away.

It was the worst apology I'd ever gotten.

Andrew Kirtzman is the former host of the political interview shows "Kirtzman and Co." on WCBS-TV and "Inside City Hall" on New York 1 News. He is the author of "Rudy Giuliani: Emperor of the City."

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Editorial: Myths About Gun Regulation

As busy as the gun lobby is in promoting macho myths about self-defense — stand your ground and outshoot the bad guys — it is no less dedicated to spinning myths for lawmakers to use as excuses to avoid enacting laws to deal with the shooting sprees that regularly afflict the nation. This was clear at the opening Senate hearing on gun controls this week, where Judiciary Committee members seemed to have largely swallowed gun lobby propaganda that the evidence shows the original 10-year ban on assault weapons was ineffective.

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Left unsaid was the fact that one of the loopholes that enabled passage of the original ban limited research on the law's effectiveness to the first year's data rather than allow more conclusive long-term studies. A long–range, independent study issued as Congress allowed the ban to expire in 2004 found criminal use of assault weapons had fallen by one-third or more as a share of gun crimes in major jurisdictions.

The information is there if Congress is interested. After the ban expired, 37 percent of police departments reported noticeable increases in criminals' use of assault weapons, according to a 2010 report by the Police Executive Research Forum.

In Virginia, the number of guns with high-capacity magazines seized by police dropped after they were included in the 1994 weapons ban, but then rebounded sharply after the ban expired, according to a 2011 study by The Washington Post. Maryland enacted its own more stringent ban on assault weapons in 1994, and a 55 percent drop in assault pistols from crime scenes was reported by the Baltimore police.

The false statistics comfort members of Congress who fear the gun lobby or their more conservative constituents, or both, and are blocking a new and stronger ban on assault weapons proposed by Senator Dianne Feinstein. The need for that ban and its outlawing of magazines of more than 10 bullets goes to the heart of the tragedy in Newtown, Conn., where a shooter took only a few minutes to trigger a rapid firing assault weapon and slay 20 schoolchildren and six educators last December.

"Too many children are dying," former Representative Gabrielle Giffords declared at the Senate hearing, her speech made halting by the head wounds she suffered in a 2011 gun assault. "You must act. Be bold," she pleaded with the lawmakers.

Since the hearing run by Senator Patrick Leahy seemed stacked with opponents of a new ban, Senator Feinstein is scheduling her own hearing with a fairer slate of witnesses reflecting the public's concern about the carnage from assault weapons. The judiciary hearing should be a call to President Obama to fight hard for maximum public involvement if an assault weapons ban is ever to have a chance in congress. "Be courageous," Ms. Giffords advised the lawmakers. "Americans are counting on you."

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Opinionator | Schooling: Teachers and Policy Makers: Troubling Disconnect

Can the school reform movement accept constructive criticism? Gary Rubinstein hopes so. Mr. Rubinstein joined Teach for America in 1991, the program's second year, and has now been teaching math for 15 years, five of them in some of the nation's neediest public schools and 10 more at the prestigious Stuyvesant High School in Manhattan. He has a bachelor's degree in math and a master's in computer science, has written two books on classroom practice and at one point helped train new corps members for Teach for America. For years, he was a proponent of the program, albeit one with the occasional quibble.

Then, in 2010, Mr. Rubinstein underwent a sea change. As he grew suspicious of some of the data used to promote charter schools, be became critical of Teach for America and the broader reform movement. (The education scholar Diane Ravitch famously made a similar shift around this time.)

Mr. Rubinstein, who knows how to crunch numbers, noticed that, at many charter schools student test scores and graduation rates didn't always add up to what the schools claimed. He was also alarmed by what he viewed as misguided reforms like an overreliance on crude standardized tests that measure students' yearly academic "growth" and teacher performance. Mr. Rubinstein, who favors improving schools and evaluating teachers, says using standardized test scores might seem "like a good idea in theory." But he also thinks the teacher ratings based on the scores are too imprecise and subject to random variation to be a reliable basis for high-stakes hiring and firing decisions.

Given his long alliance with Teach for America, Mr. Rubinstein knows many of the program's alumni who have become marquee players in school reform. In Houston, he became friends with his fellow T.F.A. teachers Dave Levin and Michael Feinberg, who went on to start KIPP, the nationwide chain of charter schools. Mr. Rubinstein worked briefly under Michelle A. Rhee before she became the chancellor of the District of Columbia's public schools. At another point, he met Michael Johnston, the former charter-school principal who is now the Colorado state senator who helped push through one of the nation's most aggressive testing schemes for teacher evaluations. Along the way, Mr. Rubinstein got to know Wendy Kopp, Teach for America's founder.

He's now written a series of "Open Letters to Reformers I Know" on his blog, hosted by teachforus.org, in which he shares his unease about the direction of current school reforms. The letters are unusual, partly for their personal tone and evident admiration of some of the recipients, and partly because attempts at dialogue like this are increasingly rare as bitter debate rages among educators who support charters and testing and those who don't.

Michael Petrilli, a research fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution and a pro-charter education analyst with the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, worries about this lack of exchange. He recently conducted an analysis of Twitter and the tens of thousands of followers of Ms. Rhee, who is pro-charter, and Ms. Ravitch, who is anti-charter, and discovered that only 10 percent overlapped. Just as conservatives gravitate to Fox News and liberals to MSNBC to hear their preconceived notions and biases confirmed, Mr. Petrilli speculates that those in education are now preaching solely to the converted, a phenomenon known in the media world as "narrowcasting."

Worse, in Mr. Petrilli's view, those who follow Ms. Rhee tend to describe themselves in their Twitter profiles as policy makers or otherwise removed from the immediate realities of the classroom, while Ms. Ravitch's devotees are typically self-identified practitioners: principals and teachers on education's front lines. Surely these folks should be talking to one another, but in Mr. Petrilli's experience, they often aren't.

"A lot of people in the reform community say, 'We know what we need to do; we just need the political will to do it,' and I think that's wrong," he says. "We need to be much more humble. We're now in a position where a lot of reforms are being enacted; they're playing out in the real world, and it's crazy not to listen to teachers, to the problems that might need to be addressed."

Mr. Petrilli's wisdom derives from hard experience: "I went through this with No Child Left Behind," he says. "We put so much effort into cheerleading and making the case for it, we didn't address the inevitable problems." Mr. Petrilli now recognizes that the law might have been stronger and worked better had its supporters been more open to input and constructive criticism from the start.

Perhaps proving Mr. Petrilli's point, only two of the eight recipients of Mr. Rubinstein's "Open Letters" — Mr. Johnston and Ms. Kopp — have replied so far (although a third, Jon Schnur, a former presidential education policy adviser and the executive chairman of America Achieves, had already promised to do so before being contacted for this article and says he still will). However, Mr. Johnston chose not to publicly answer some of Mr. Rubinstein's more pointed criticisms. For example, Mr. Johnston has stated that the alternative school he helped establish and where he was a principal "made Colorado history by becoming the first public high school in which 100 percent of seniors were admitted to four-year colleges."

As Mr. Rubinstein notes, the claim is technically accurate but misleading because the school also had very high attrition rates before its students graduated. This is the kind of data distortion Mr. Rubinstein disparages: "There were actually 73 10th graders," Mr. Rubinstein writes, "who had dwindled to 44 seniors — a pretty relevant detail." The school apparently couldn't meet the needs of a good proportion of its original students. Many of those who left presumably ended up back in traditional public schools, which often become the dumping grounds for students whom charters can't, or won't, teach and then are solely blamed for these students' failure.

Still, Mr. Rubinstein concedes that even 44 graduates out of 73, in many low-income communities, amounts to "a story about kids beating the odds." But why the need to exaggerate the sales pitch instead of acknowledging the more complex, challenging picture?

At the heart of all Mr. Rubinstein's "Open Letters" is a plea to his old friends and colleagues, many of whom long ago left the classroom, to remember just how hard teaching is and to remain honest and transparent about what they have and haven't accomplished, not only to keep faith with those teachers and principals entrusted with the tough job of implementing reforms but also so we can know what truly works and doesn't and why, in order to build on real, not imagined, gains.

For those who wish to be part of the solution, Mr. Petrilli advises more genuine dialogue: listening to those whose views one opposes and "staying open to the possibility," he writes, "that they might, nevertheless, have a few smart things to say."

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Editorial: A Chuck Hagel Confirmation Ordeal

Like many people, we had questions we wanted Chuck Hagel to answer at his confirmation hearing for defense secretary on Thursday. What are his real views about Israel, Iran and the use of American power to police the world? Why did he say such ridiculous things about a gay ambassadorial candidate in 1998? How did his views evolve, if, indeed, they have?

Mr. Hagel was disappointingly unsure of himself at times during the hearing (Former Senators Sam Nunn and John Warner, who endorsed him, offered up a better defense of his candidacy than Mr. Hagel did). The senators, especially Republicans, did a poor job of drawing substance out of the moment.

But after his appearance, it's clear that Mr. Hagel is very much in the mainstream of American foreign policy, has a résumé and experience that would be valuable at the Pentagon and is capable of speaking his mind, even if he allowed himself on Thursday to back off on some positions, like his concern for Palestinians, in the face of a Republican attack on his nomination. Republicans on the military affairs panel may vote against him for political reasons, but they have no cause to do so, and he should be confirmed by the full Senate.

There is much to like about the approach to national security policy taken by this decorated Vietnam veteran and former senator who is among a fading breed of sensible, moderate Republicans. Republicans do not like him straying from positions on whether it was wise to leave Iraq, whether sanctions are working on Iran and on other issues, but that independence is among his more attractive qualities, especially in a fast-changing and complex world. He will give President Obama good advice.

Mr. Hagel's opponents fret that he will not be sufficiently in lock step with the current Israeli government and cannot be counted on to go to war over Iran's nuclear program if it comes to that. As a result, the hearing focused excessively on Israel and Iran and ignored many other important challenges — including the growing militancy in northern Africa and the war in Afghanistan.

Senators John McCain of Arizona, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and Ted Cruz of Texas, all Republicans, were particularly snide and dismissive of Mr. Hagel and more interested in bullying him and playing a game of gotcha than in eliciting thoughtful policy responses.

Mr. Hagel repeatedly proclaimed support for Israel, and he firmly agreed with Mr. Obama's policy that Iran's nuclear program must be prevented, not contained. But no explanation by Mr. Hagel was ever enough for his camera-concscious critics.

The Republicans did their best to make it seem as if Mr. Hagel's support for a group called Global Zero, which advocates deep cuts in nuclear weapons, was some kind of wild-eyed, left-wing plot. The group is backed by many responsible figures, including James Cartwright, a former vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Separately, the general goal of eliminating nuclear weapons has been embraced by the former secretaries of state Henry Kissinger and George Shultz, Senator Sam Nunn, and Mr. Obama himself.

In 1998, as a senator from Nebraska, Mr. Hagel sneered that an ambassadorial candidate was "openly, aggressively gay." It was a blindly bigoted comment and raised questions about how he would implement the removal of the military's ban on openly gay members.

At the hearing, Mr. Hagel expressed his commitment to equal treatment of all service members and said he would do "everything possible under current law" to provide equal benefits to the families of all service members. That was reassuring, but no senator bothered to ask him to explain how his views had changed since 1998 and why.

Republicans were not going to make this confirmation hearing easy, especially after an unprecedented and dishonest campaign to derail his nomination. The Senate briskly confirmed Mr. Obama's choice for secretary of state, Senator John Kerry. It should now confirm Mr. Hagel.

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Op-Ed Contributor: My Valuable, Cheap College Degree

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MUCH is being written about the preposterously high cost of college. The median inflation-adjusted household income fell by 7 percent between 2006 and 2011, while the average real tuition at public four-year colleges increased over that period by over 18 percent. Meanwhile, the average tuition for just one year at a four-year private university in 2011 was almost $33,000, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. College tuition has increased at twice the rate of health care costs over the past 25 years.

Ballooning student loan debt, an impending college bubble, and a return on the bachelor's degree that is flat or falling: all these things scream out for entrepreneurial solutions.

One idea gaining currency is the $10,000 college degree — the so-called 10K-B.A. — which apparently was inspired by a challenge to educators from Bill Gates, and has recently led to efforts to make it a reality by governors in Texas, Florida and Wisconsin, as well as by a state assemblyman in California.

Most 10K-B.A. proposals rethink the costliest part of higher education — the traditional classroom teaching. Predictably, this means a reliance on online and distance-learning alternatives. And just as predictably, this has stimulated antibodies to unconventional modes of learning. Some critics see it as an invitation to charlatans and diploma mills. Even supporters often suggest that this is just an idea to give poor people marginally better life opportunities.

As Darryl Tippens, the provost of Pepperdine University, recently put it, "No PowerPoint presentation or elegant online lecture can make up for the surprise, the frisson, the spontaneous give-and-take of a spirited, open-ended dialogue with another person." And what happens when you excise those frissons? In the words of the president of one university faculty association, "You're going to be awarding degrees that are worthless to people."

I disagree. I possess a 10K-B.A., which I got way back in 1994. And it was the most important intellectual and career move I ever made.

After high school, I spent an unedifying year in college. The year culminated in money problems, considerably less than a year of credits, and a joint decision with the school that I should pursue my happiness elsewhere. Next came what my parents affectionately called my "gap decade," during which time I made my living as a musician. By my late 20s I was ready to return to school. But I was living in Spain, had a thin bank account, and no desire to start my family with a mountain of student loans.

Fortunately, there was a solution — an institution called Thomas Edison State College in Trenton, N.J. This is a virtual college with no residence requirements. It banks credits acquired through inexpensive correspondence courses from any accredited college or university in America.

I took classes by mail from the University of Washington, the University of Wyoming, and other schools with the lowest-priced correspondence courses I could find. My degree required the same number of credits and type of classes that any student at a traditional university would take. I took the same exams (proctored at local libraries and graded by graduate students) as in-person students. But I never met a teacher, never sat in a classroom, and to this day have never laid eyes on my beloved alma mater.

And the whole degree, including the third-hand books and a sticker for the car, cost me about $10,000 in today's dollars.

Now living back in the United States, I followed the 10K-B.A. with a 5K-M.A. at a local university while working full time, and then endured the standard penury of being a full-time doctoral fellow in a residential Ph.D. program. The final tally for a guy in his 30s supporting a family: three degrees, zero debt.

Did I earn a worthless degree? Hardly. My undergraduate years may have been bereft of frissons, but I wound up with a career as a tenured professor at Syracuse University, a traditional university. I am now the president of a Washington research organization.

Not surprisingly, my college experience has occasionally been the target of ridicule. It is true that I am no Harvard Man. But I can say with full confidence that my 10K-B.A. is what made higher education possible for me, and it changed the course of my life. More people should have this opportunity, in a society that is suffering from falling economic and social mobility.

The 10K-B.A. is exactly the kind of innovation we would expect in an industry that is showing every indication of a bubble that is about to burst, as Thomas K. Lindsay of the Texas Public Policy Foundation shows in a new report titled, "Anatomy of a Revolution? The Rise of the $10,000 Bachelor's Degree." When tuition skyrockets and returns on education stagnate, we can expect a flight to value, especially by people who can least afford to ride the bubble, and who have no choice but to make a cost-effective college investment.

In the end, however, the case for the 10K-B.A. is primarily moral, not financial. The entrepreneurs who see a way for millions to go to college affordably are the ones who understand the American dream. That dream is the opportunity to build a life through earned success. That starts with education.

Arthur C. Brooks is president of the American Enterprise Institute and a former professor at Syracuse University.

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Editorial: Treatment, Not Jail, for the Mentally Ill in New York City

Mayor Michael Bloomberg has started an important new corrections initiative focused on mentally ill offenders, who make up about a third of the city's jail population and are more likely than other prisoners to resume criminal behavior once they are freed. The aim is to give the courts up-to-date information about a defendant's record and mental health status so that a judge can decide whether the defendant should be sent to a treatment program instead of jail.

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The initiative emerged from a recent study of mentally ill inmates by the Council of State Governments Justice Center, a research and policy group. Among other things, it found that the mentally ill who enter the corrections system were an increasingly expensive problem in the city — costing three times as much as inmates without mental disabilities — and that their numbers were growing, even as the jail population as a whole was declining. In 2011, they made up 33 percent of the average daily jail population, as opposed to 24 percent in 2005.

Mentally ill inmates also stay in jail nearly twice as long as people without mental illness, an average of 112 days compared with 61 days. One of the problems is that the mentally ill are less likely to make bail because they have less money and fewer family members or friends who are willing to get them out.

In many other large urban centers, judges are able to make decisions about bail and community-based treatment because they have ready access to data showing the defendant's mental health history and risk. Mr. Bloomberg hopes to bring such a system to New York by creating centralized teams that quickly collect the information and relay it to the courts. These teams will also connect mentally ill defendants to appropriate community-based services. They will then inform the courts about the defendant's progress.

This represents an important first step. But the city will have to make strides in other areas as well. For example, it needs to ensure that mentally ill people who receive drugs and treatment through the Medicaid program do not fall off the welfare rolls for bureaucratic reasons. This increases the risk that they will behave in ways that land them in trouble.

In addition, mentally ill people who lose eligibility for Medicaid or federal disability benefits because they have been jailed must be re-enrolled in those programs before they are released and provided with enough medication to tide them over until they are established in treatment. Left to their own devices, they frequently "self medicate" — with illicit drugs or alcohol — which, of course, makes them vulnerable to being picked up again and taken back to jail.

The city should also revisit its "quality of life" policing strategy, under which people who commit minor offenses are deliberately hauled off the streets to jail. In an ideal system, the mentally ill who commit minor offenses and present no real danger to the public would never see the inside of a jail but would instead be referred directly to treatment.

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